“Fusion is now within reach” and represents “one of the economic opportunities of the century”. Not the words of an optimistic fusion scientist but from Kerry McCarthy, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

She was speaking on Tuesday at the inaugural Fusion Fest by Economist Impact. Held in London, the day-long event featured 400 attendees and more than 60 speakers from around the world.

McCarthy outlined several initiatives to keep the UK at the “forefront of fusion”. That includes investing £20m into Starmaker One, a £100m endeavour announced in early April to kickstart UK investment fusion fund.

The usual cliché is that fusion is always being 20 years away, perhaps not helped by large international projects such as the ITER experimental fusion reactor that is currently being built in Cadarache, France, which has struggling with delays and cost hikes.

Yet many delegates at the meeting were optimistic that significant developments are within reach with private firms racing to demonstrate “breakeven” – generating more power out than needed to fuel the reaction. Some expect “a few” private firms to announce breakeven by 2030.

And these aren’t small ventures. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, based in Massachusetts, US, for example, has 1300 people. Yet large international companies are, for the moment, only dipping their toe into the fusion pool.

While some $8bn has already been spent by private firms on fusion, many expect the funding floodgates to open once breakeven has been achieved in a private lab.

Most stated that a figure of about $50-60bn, however, would be needed to make fusion a real endeavour in terms of delivering power to the grid, something that could happen in the 2040s. But it was reiterated throughout the day that fusion must provide energy at a price that consumers would be willing to pay.

On target

It is not only private firms that are making progress. Many will point out that ITER has laid much of the groundwork in terms of fostering a fusion “ecosystem” – a particular buzzword of the day – that was demonstrated, in part, by the significant attendence at the event.

And developments are not just being confined to magnetic fusion. Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is home to the National Ignition Facility, noted that the machine had recently achieved a fusion gain for the eighth time.

In a recent shot, she said that the device had produced 7 MJ with about 2 MJ having been delivered to the small capsule target. This represents a gain of about 3.4 – much more than its previous record of 2.4.

NIF, which is based on inertial confinement fusion rather than magnetic confinement, is currently undergoing refurbishment and upgrades. It is hoped that this will increase the energy input to about 2.6 MJ but gains of between 10-15 will be demonstrated if the technique can go anywhere.

Despite the number of fusion firms ballooning from a handful in the early 2010s to some 30 today, the general feeling at the meeting was that only a few will likely go on to build power plants, with the remainder using fusion for other sectors.

The issue is that no-one knew what technology would likely succeed, so all to play for.

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The CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva has released plans for the 15bn SwFr (£13bn) Future Circular Collider (FCC) – a huge 91 km circumference machine. The three-volume feasibility study, released on 31 March, calls for the giant accelerator to collide electrons with positrons to study the Higgs boson in unprecedented detail. If built, the FCC would replace the 27 km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which will come to an end in the early 2040s.

Work on the FCC feasibility study began in 2020 and the report examines the physics objectives, geology, civil engineering, technical infrastructure and territorial and environmental impact. It also looks at the R&D needed for the accelerators and detectors as well as the socioeconomic benefits and cost.

The study, involving some 150 institutes in over 30 countries, took into account some 100 different scenarios for the collider before landing on a ring circumference of 90.7 km that would be built underground at a depth of about 200 m, on average.

The FCC would also contain eight surface sites to access the tunnel with seven in France and one in Switzerland, and four main detectors. “The design is such that there is minimal impact on the surface, but with the best possible physics output,” says FCC study leader Michael Benedikt.

The funding model for the FCC is still a work in progress, but it is estimated that at least two-thirds of the cost of building the FCC-ee will come from CERN’s 24 member states.

Four committees will now review the feasibility study, beginning with CERN’s scientific committee in July. It will then go to a cost-review panel before being reviewed by the CERN council’s scientific and finance committees. In November, the CERN council will then examine the proposal with a decision to go ahead taken in 2028.

If given the green light, construction on the FCC electron-positron machine, dubbed FCC-ee, would begin in 2030 and it would start operations in 2047, a few years after the High Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) closes down, and run for about 15 years.  It’s main aim would be to study the Higgs boson with a much better precision that the LHC.

The FCC feasibility study then calls for a hadron machine, dubbed FCC-hh, to replace the FCC-ee in the existing 91 km tunnel. It would be a “discovery machine”, smashing together protons at high energy with the aim of creating new particles. If built, the FCC-hh will begin operation in 2073 and run to the end of the century.

The original design energy for the FCC-hh was to reach 100 TeV but that has now been reduced to 85 TeV.  That is mostly due to the uncertainty in magnet technology. The HL-LHC will use 12 T superconducting quadrupole magnets made from niobium-tin (Nb₃Sn) to squeeze the beams to boost the luminosity.

CERN engineers think it is possible to increase that to 14 T and if this was used for the FCC it would result in a collision centre-of-mass energy of about 85 TeV. “It’s a prudent approach at this stage,” noted Fabiola Gianotti, current CERN director-general, adding that the FCC would be “the most extraordinary instrument ever built.”

The original design called for high-temperature superconducting magnets, such as so-called ReBCO tapes, and CERN is looking into such technology. If it came to fruition in the necessary timescales and was implemented in the FCC-hh then it could push the energy to 120 TeV.

China plans

One potential spanner in the works is China’s plans for a very similar machine called the Circular Election-Positron Collider (CEPC). A decision on the CEPC could come this year with construction beginning in 2027.

Yet officials at CERN are not concerned. They point to the fact that many different colliders have been built by CERN, which has the expertise as well as infrastructure to build such a huge collider.  “Even if China goes ahead, I hope the decision is to compete,” says CERN council president Costas Fountas. “Just like Europe did with the LHC when the US started to build the [cancelled] Superconducting Super Collider.”

If the CERN council decides, however, not to go ahead with the FCC, then Gianotti says that other designs to replace the LHC are still on the table such as a linear machine or a demonstrator muon collider.

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Disabled people in science must be recognized and given better support to help reverse the numbers of such people dropping out of science. That is the conclusion of a new report released today by the National Association of Disabled Staff Networks (NADSN). It also calls for funders to stop supporting institutions that have toxic research cultures and for a change in equality law to recognize the impact of discrimination on disabled people including neurodivergent people.

About 22% of working-age adults in the UK are disabled. Yet it is estimated that only 6.4% of people in science have a disability, falling to just 4% for senior academic positions. What’s more, barely 1% of research grant applications to UK Research and Innovation – the umbrella organization for the UK’s main funding councils – are from researchers who disclose being disabled. Disabled researchers who do win grants receive less than half the amount compared to non-disabled researchers.

NADSN is an umbrella organization for disabled staff networks, with a focus on higher education. It includes the STEMM Action Group, which was founded in 2020 and consists of nine people at universities across the UK who work in science and have lived experience of disability, chronic illness or neurodivergence. The group develops recommendations to funding bodies, learned societies and higher-education institutions to address barriers faced by those who are marginalised due to disability.

In 2021 the group published a “problem statement” that identified issues facing disabled people in science. They range from digital problems, such as the need for accessible fonts in reports and presentations, to physical concerns such as needing access ramps for people in wheelchairs or automatic doors to open heavy fire doors. Other issues include the need for adjustable desks in offices and wheelchair accessible labs.

“Many of these physical issues tend to be afterthoughts in the planning process,” says Francesca Doddato, a physicist from Lancaster University, who co-wrote the latest report. “But at that point they are much harder, and more costly, to implement.”

We need to have this big paradigm shift in terms of how we see disability inclusion

Francesca Doddato

Workplace attitudes and cultures can also be a big problem for disabled people in science, some 62% of whom report having been bullied and harassed compared to 43% of all scientists. “Unfortunately, in research and academia there is generally a toxic culture in which you are expected to be hyper productive, move all over the world, and have a focus on quantity over quality in terms of research output,” says Doddato. “This, coupled with society-wide attitudes towards disabilities, means that many disabled people struggle to get promoted and drop out of science.”

The action group spent the past four years compiling their latest report – Towards a fully inclusive environment for disabled people in STEMM – to present solutions to these issues. They hope it will raise awareness of the inequity and discrimination experienced by disabled people in science and to highlight the benefits of having an inclusive environment.

The report identifies three main areas that will have to be reformed to make science fully inclusive for disabled scientists: enabling inclusive cultures and practices; enhancing accessible physical and digital environments; and accessible and proactive funding.

In the short term, it calls on people to recognize the challenges and barriers facing disabled researchers and to improve work-based training for managers. “One of the best things is just being willing to listen and ask what can I do to help?” notes Doddato. “Being an ally is vitally important.”

Doddato says that sharing meeting agendas and documents ahead of time, ensuring that documents are presented in accessible formats, or acknowledging that tasks such as getting around campus can take longer are some aspects that can be useful.“All of these little things can really go a long way in shifting those attitudes and being an ally, and those things they don’t need policies that people need to be willing to listen and be willing to change.”

Medium- and long-term goals in the report involve holding organisations responsible for their working practice polices and to stop promoting and funding toxic research cultures. “We hope that report encourages funding bodies to put pressure on institutions if they are demonstrating toxicity and being discriminatory,” adds Doddato. The report also calls for a change to equality law to recognize the impact of intersectional discrimination, although it admits that this will be a “large undertaking” and will be the subject of a further NADSN report.

Doddato adds that disabled people’s voices need to be hear “loud and clear” as part of any changes. “What we are trying to address with the report is to push universities, research institutions and societies to stop only talking about doing something and actually implement change,” says Doddato. “We need to have a big paradigm shift in terms of how we see disability inclusion. It’s time for change.”

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Researchers at the University of Edinburgh in the UK have built a prototype “hairy robotic gripper” that is inspired by the hairs found on ant jaws.

Ants are not only excellent nest builders but are also expert foragers, able to carry food and other items that can be many times their own weight.

Part of that ability lies in their powerful jaws, with snap-jaw ants able to close their mandibles at a top speed of 400 kmph.

Ant jaws also feature small hairs that are used to sense items but also to mechanically stabilise their grip on the objects.

Edinburgh researchers filmed ants and the sequence of movements they do when picking up seeds and other things. They then used this to build a robot gripper.

The device consists of two aluminium plates that each contain four rows of “hairs” made from thermoplastic polyurethane.

The hairs are 20 mm long and 1 mm in diameter, protruding in a v-shape. This allowing the hairs to surround circular objects, which can be particularly difficult to grasp and hold onto using parallel plates.

In tests picking up 30 different household items including a jam jar and shampoo bottle (see video), adding hairs to the gripper increased the prototype’s grasp success rate from 64% to 90%.

The researchers think that such a device could be used in environmental clean-up as well as in construction and agriculture.

Barbara Webb from the University of Edinburgh, who led the research, says the work is “just the first step”.

“Now we can see how [ants’] antennae, front legs and jaws combine to sense, manipulate, grasp and move objects – for instance, we’ve discovered how much ants rely on their front legs to get objects in position,” she adds. “This will inform further development of our technology.”

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The first direct evidence for auroras on Neptune has been spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Auroras happen when energetic particles from the Sun become trapped in a planet’s magnetic field and eventually strike the upper atmosphere with the energy released creating a signature glow.

Auroral activity has previously been seen on Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus but not on Neptune despite hints in a flyby of the planet by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989.

“Imaging the auroral activity on Neptune was only possible with [the JWST’s] near-infrared sensitivity,” notes Henrik Melin from Northumbria University. “It was so stunning to not just see the auroras, but the detail and clarity of the signature really shocked me.”

The data was taken by JWST’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph as well as Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. The cyan on the image above represent auroral activity and is shown together with white clouds on a multi-hued blue orb that is Neptune.

While auroras on Earth occur at the poles, on Neptune they happen elsewhere. This is due to the nature of Neptune’s magnetic field, which is tilted by 47 degrees from the planet’s rotational axis.

As well as the visible imagery, the JWST also detected an emission line from trihydrogen cation (H3+), which can be created in auroras.

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While the physics of uncorking a bottle of champagne has been well documented, less is known about the mechanisms at play when opening a swing-top bottle of beer.

Physicist Max Koch from the University of Göttingen in Germany, decided to find out more.

Koch, who is a keen homebrewer, and colleagues used a high-speed camera and a microphone to capture what was going on together with computational fluid-dynamics simulations.

When opening a carbonated bottle under pressure, the difference between the gas pressure in the bottleneck and ambient pressure as it opens results in a rapid escape of gas from the bottle, which can reach the speed of sound.

In a champagne bottle, this results in the creation of a Mach disc as well the classic “pop” sound as it is uncorked.

To investigate the gas dynamics in swing-top bottles, Kock and colleagues examined transparent 0.33 litre bottles, which contained home-brewed ginger beer under 2–5 bars of pressure.

The team found that the sound emitted when opening the bottles, what can be described as an “ah” sound, wasn’t due to a single shockwave, but rather condensation in the bottleneck forming a standing wave.

“The pop’s frequency is much lower than the resonation if you blow on the full bottle like a whistle,” notes Koch. “This is caused by the sudden expansion of the carbon dioxide and air mixture in the bottle, as well as a strong cooling effect to about minus 50 degrees Celsius, which reduces sound speed.”

The team also investigated the sloshing of the beverage as it is opened. First, the dissolved carbon dioxide inside the beer triggers the level of the liquid to rise while the motion of the bottle as it opens also causes the liquid to slosh.

Another effect during opening is the bottle-top hitting the glass with its sharp edge. This triggers further “gushing” in the liquid due to the enhanced formation of bubbles.

There are still some unanswered questions, however, which will require further work. “One thing we didn’t resolve is that our numerical simulations showed an initial strong peak in the acoustic emission before the short ‘ah’ resonance, but this peak was absent in the experimentation,” adds Koch.

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The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the first batch of survey data from its €1.4bn Euclid mission. The release includes a preview of its “deep field” where in just one week of observations, Euclid already spotted 26 million galaxies as well as many transient phenomena such as supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. The dataset is published along with 27 scientific papers that will be submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The dataset also features a catalogue of 380,000 galaxies that have been detected by artificial intelligence or “citizen-science” efforts. They include those with spiral arms, central bars and “tidal tails”, inferring merging galaxies.

There has also been the discovery of 500 gravitational-lens candidates thanks to AI and citizen science. Gravitational lensing in when light from more distant galaxies is bent around closer galaxies due to gravity and it can help identify where dark matter is located and its properties.

“For the past decade, my research has been defined by painstakingly analysing the same 50 strong gravitational lenses, but with the data release, I was handed 500 new strong lenses in under a week,” says astronomer James Nightingale from Newcastle University. “It’s a seismic shift – transforming how I do science practically overnight.”

The data released today still represents only 0.4% of the total number of galaxies that Euclid is expected to image over its lifetime. Euclid will capture images of more than 1.5 billion galaxies over six years, sending back around 100 GB of data every day.

“Euclid shows itself once again to be the ultimate discovery machine. It is surveying galaxies on the grandest scale, enabling us to explore our cosmic history and the invisible forces shaping our universe,” says ESA’s science director, Carole Mundell. “With the release of the first data from Euclid’s survey, we are unlocking a treasure trove of information for scientists to dive into and tackle some of the most intriguing questions in modern science”.

More data to come

Euclid was launched in July 2023 and is currently located in a spot in space called Lagrange Point 2 – a gravitational balance point some 1.5 million kilometres beyond the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The Euclid Consortium comprises some 2600 members from more than 15 countries.

Euclid has a 1.2 m-diameter telescope, a camera and a spectrometer that it uses to plot a 3D map of the distribution of galaxies. The images it takes are about four times as sharp as current ground-based telescopes.

Euclid released its first images in November 2023 and began routine observations in February 2024, releasing a first data batch in May 2024.

The mission’s first “cosmology data” will be released in October 2026.

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NASA has launched a $488m infrared mission to map the distribution of galaxies and study cosmic inflation. The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) mission was launched yesterday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California by a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket.

Set to operate for two years in a polar orbit about 650 km from the Earth’s surface, SPHEREx will collect data from 450 million galaxies as well as more than 100 million stars to create a 3D map of the cosmos.

It will use to this gain an insight into cosmic inflation – the rapid expansion of the universe following the Big Bang.

It will also search the Milky Way for hidden reservoirs of water, carbon dioxide and other ingredients critical for life as well as study the cosmic glow of light from the space between galaxies.

The craft features three concentric shields that surround the telescope to protect it from light and heat. Three mirrors, including a 20 cm primary mirror, collect light before feed it into filters and detectors. The set-up allows the telescope to resolve 102 different wavelengths of light.

Packing a punch

SPHEREx has been launched together with another NASA mission dubbed Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH). Via a constellation of four satellites in a low-Earth orbit, PUNCH will make 3D observations of the Sun’s corona to learn how the mass and energy become solar wind. It will also explore the formation and evolution of space weather events such as coronal mass ejections, which can create storms of energetic particle radiation that can be damaging to spacecraft.

PUNCH will now undergo a three-month commissioning period in which the four satellites will enter the correct orbital formation and the instruments calibrated to operate as a single “virtual instrument” before it begins studying the solar wind.

“Everything in NASA science is interconnected, and sending both SPHEREx and PUNCH up on a single rocket doubles the opportunities to do incredible science in space,” noted Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate. “Congratulations to both mission teams as they explore the cosmos from far-out galaxies to our neighbourhood star. I am excited to see the data returned in the years to come.”

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